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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tervin" data-source="post: 4239791" data-attributes="member: 66491">Having played and DMed all the earlier editions (apart from OD&D) quite a bit I would say that I do not agree with your assessment of the older editions. If I would keep it simple, it would be like this:BE... D&D: Fighting game, where you were encouraged to free wheel in some roleplaying. (Might be more stuff here, the version I remember the least.)AD&D 1: See above. A few hints about character backgrounds in the DMG, and (regrettably mostly pointless) secondary skills in crappy splatbooks.AD&D 2: Secondary skills now meant to be primitive skills, in order to help you build a character for out of fighting gaming. In depth splat books for different classes to help build roles (mostly for fighting mind you...).D&D 3: Ambitious lists of skills and feats. Prestige classes and splat books take this further. Weakness is that roleplaying can become technical as the free wheel improvisation is not needed as much. This changed the DM's role a bit from being "judge of free wheel" to "merger of system and free wheel". D&D 4: Too early to tell, but seems to be simplifying a bit of what D&D 3 did and adding complexity to others (like skill challenges). DM as merger of system and imagination might become even more important.What is different in the newer versions of D&D is that you can roleplay without roleplaying. Meaning, you can do out of combat things by using skills, instead of by describing them in detail. To me, this helps storytelling. This way it is possible to roll through less important scenes and play through the moments that matter. Also as a DM it means I can let the system decide sometimes instead of making all calls myself. And by doing that (and weaving the results into my roleplay) I actually usually get a lot more fun out of things, and the players feel more like what they choose to do matters.Whoops. Didn't mean to start lecturing. Sorry.</blockquote>

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